Particle
system:
A modeling technique to enable the rendering
of explosions, and other complex physical phenomena such as fire, smoke, snow,
clouds, rain, dust, or wind.
Patch:
A small program to add on to an existing piece
of software, with the purpose of improving (e.g. integrating 3D functions) or
correcting (e.g. removing bugs) its performance.
PCB
(Printed Circuit Board):
A fiberglass board on which chips
and other components are connected via copper pathways. For example, your 3D
Prophet graphics board is a PCB.
PCI
(Peripheral Connect Interface):
The expansion bus
slots found at the back of most PCs. Network cards, audio and graphics boards,
and hard disk controllers are the different peripherals using the PCI bus. The
PCI bus transfers information to and from the peripheral and the operating
system.
Perspective
correction:
This is the modification of textures
while taking into account convergence when moving away from an object, which
removes distortion that appears when a texture map
is applied to a polygon in space. This function
measures the depth of the scene while rendering texels
onto the surface of polygons, creating the illusion that objects nearer the
forefront of the screen are larger, whilst allowing parallel lines to converge
in the distance.
Pipelining:
AGP graphics boards can queue multiple commands,
which means that during the memory/bus access time
of one command other commands are being issued.
Pixel:
Abbreviation for PIcture ELement. This is the
smallest element that can be assigned to a specific color, i.e. the "dots" that
make up your TV or computer screen pictures. It is the intersection of a column
and a line on a screen: in an 800 by 600 resolution
(800 columns by 600 lines), there are 800x600 pixels = 480,000.
Pixelisation:
A problem caused by the inability of some graphics
boards to display changes in pixel appearance when the picture is zoomed, due
to the slow frame rate of some devices. 3D Prophet
graphics boards correct this problem by applying a texture
to an object and then regularly updating the state of the texture and the pixels
of which it is comprised, processing by bilinear
filtering or mip-mapping. This is updated frame
by frame as opposed to being updated only when necessary.
Polygon:
A three or more sided 2D shape. These are used
to create 3D environments.
Primitive
shapes:
Simple shapes assembled to create the final shape of one object (sphere, cube,
cone, cylinder etc.)